During the last decade, financial communication texts - including corporate compulsory and voluntary disclosures, analysts’ recommendations, rating announcements, central banks’ reports and speeches, financial news stories and other media (e.g. blogs, forums) - have been increasingly investigated from different perspectives. Scholars in Accounting and Finance recognize linguistic and textual data as significant, respectively, for evaluating the quality of financial disclosures and for predicting market sentiment and security prices. Their interest for the language used in financial texts naturally converges with the research concerns of scholars in the humanities (including Linguistics, Rhetoric and Argumentation Theory), who have explored the different discourse genres of financial communication, relying linguistic choices and conventions to communication strategies and reconstructing their narrative and argumentative organization. In these strands of research language and discourse are not treated as neutral carriers of information, but are increasingly viewed as strategic resources for collective sense-making and persuasion as well as means for shaping the institutional realities of the financial markets. The conference on Discourse Approaches to Financial Communication (DAFC) aims at bringing together scholars who, from different scientific backgrounds, are interested in understanding the linguistic, rhetorical and argumentative functions of the narrative parts of financial disclosures and of other financially relevant documents, and, eventually, their impact on investment decisions and market transactions. By creating the occasion for close interdisciplinary dialogue between these diverse disciplines, the conference will enable developing a common research agenda on financial communication centered on the systematic analysis of financial discourse.

Location:

The Centro Stefano Franscini (http://www.csf.ethz.ch) is the congress centre of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology of Zurich (ETH Zurich) situated at Monte Verità in the surroundings of Ascona, Switzerland (http://www.monteverita.org). Ascona is on the north-western shore of Lake Maggiore, on the large delta of the River Maggia. This centre has hosted several international events that brought together numerous members of the international scientific community across a range of research disciplines.

Participants will be accommodated in the Centro Stefano Franscini at Monte Verità. The fee will include full board, coffee breaks and lodging. Please note that rooms in the Centro Stefano Franscini are limited and will be allocated on a first-come, first-served basis.

Submissions should include a one-page abstract of maximum 300 words, the name of the author(s), position, affiliation, contact details and should specify whether a regular paper or a PhD paper is proposed. Abstracts will be evaluated by the Scientific Committee in terms of relevance, quality and originality.

NB: the Conftool account is used only for the submission of abstracts, the registration to the conference must be made through the CSF online platform.

Online publication of long abstracts: All accepted speakers can publish a long abstract of their paper online. Long abstracts must not exceed 1000 words (references excluded) and should comply with the template published on the conference website: http://www.dafc.usi.ch (the website will be published in the first week of June).

Book/journal publication: The publication of a selection of the papers presented at the conference in book/journal formats is envisaged. Further information will be given during the conference.

Deadlines:

Deadline for abstract submissions: September 15, 2013 Notification of acceptance: October 15, 2013 Early registration: October 31, 2013Deadline for long abstracts: December 10, 2013Registration deadline (for contributors): February 2, 2014Conference: February 2-6, 2014